| Names: | | | Dates: | 1939, 13 September - | | Born: | US, NY, Brooklyn | | Active: | US |
American photographer with a sense of the grotesque. His exploration of the extreme sides of the human personality are bizarre and at times erotic.Preparing biographies
Biography provided by Focal Press
Witkin’s dark, shocking tableaux portray beauty in the grotesque and give form to photography’s power to confront taboos. Populated by deformed people, hermaphrodites, dwarfs, corpses, and body parts collected and combined to make psychologically charged, highly controversial images, Witkin’s images "reflect the insanity of life." Drawing from the history of art and his personal spirituality, Witkin conjures a darkly mythological imagery, compelling and provoking us with his exquisitely beautiful grotesqueries. His black and white prints, toned, bleached, and containing scratches and scars made to the negative, are coated with wax overlays on the print’s rich surface. Active as an exhibiting artist since the 1970s, Witkin lives in New Mexico.
(Author: Garie Waltzer - Photographer and consultant)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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Family history
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The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
If there is an analysis of a single photograph or a useful self portrait I will highlight it here. |
• Koetzle, Hans-Michael 2002 Photo Icons: The Story Behind the Pictures - Volume 2 (Koln: Taschen) [This book discusses one photograph "Un Santo Oscuro (1987)" by Joel-Peter Witkin in considerable detail. An excellent source for a detailed analysis.]
• Sobieszek, Robert A. and Deborah Irmas 1994 the camera i: Photographic Self-Portraits (Los Angeles: LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art) p.237, Plate 134 [When the Audrey and Sydney Irmas collection was donated to LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992 the museum gained a remarkable collection of self portraits of notable photographers. If you need a portrait of Joel-Peter Witkin this is a useful starting point.]
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| "I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of someday seeing it all." |
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